Don’t know who I’m thinking will read this.
Do know, this should be shared widely.
Also, what a difference an inauguration can make, eh?
I’m waiting for the ink to come for the Big project, but I’m in the mood to print, and it’s somebody’s birthday. So I rummaged around in my collection of erasers and found a couple that could be sacrificed.
The red and yellow are two sides of the same Pink Pearl eraser. The star-ish one is some random eraser, Neon Tropix? it might have said? The pattern is created by printing twice, turning the eraser 180ยบ. The red and yellow inks I’ve have for a few years, the gold I’ve had for Maybe Thirty-Five Years. My goal of using up all the accumulated art supplies is both worthy and incentivizing. I’m proud that my brain was able to come up with the turn-and-print design. All those years wasted on the internet maybe weren’t so wasted after all.
I made this stamp maybe 8? years ago? Dead center of a deep dark pit.
I carved it and printed it and burst into tears for being such a stupid person, but you’ll notice I didn’t throw it away. Now it makes me happy.
What else? Tomorrow is the great sourdough pizza extravaganza. The starter I ordered on line is lightly perking. I should have enough that I don’t have to use it all on the pizza, so maybe I can get back into the rhythm of sourdough again. I did it before, baking sourdough bread every week for a couple of years, but I don’t remember how I kept the starter, or how to make the bread even. I know there was the part where I’d mix up what I guess is a poolish or something, and slip it into the oven to stay warm and get excited. I mostly remember this because of the time I went to slip it into the oven and OH LOOK A SNAKE! Life on the farm was exciting. And I didn’t scream, because other people were napping. (Not particularly scared of snakes, but having one in my oven was a little weird.)
I was going to call them long-term, but really they’re pretty finite. Or maybe “long-term” now means “a week.” Being in the middle of a project keeps me from drifting off too far. Enough said.
Daughter’s birthday is approaching, and because I like her even more after being locked in a house with her for nearly a year, I’m creating a spectacle birthday. It seems fitting, here where hope is starting back up.
Dinner will be the SanFran pizza from “Inside Out,” courtesy of Binging with Babish. I have a fairly successful history with sourdough, but not recently! My two homegrown attempts ended up smelling very bad (I won’t describe), and research on the internet said that anything made with stinky sourdough would taste just as bad. So I ordered SanFrancisco starter through the link in the description, oh yeah, plenty of time, but wait Martin Luther King day, so we’re down to the wire on it being active by the day in question. I moved it to the floor in my bedroom by the radiator to give it a warmer environment. There are signs of life, and no bad smell.
The other request is for a cake made with matcha tea powder, which according to the photos accompanying the recipe will in fact be a pleasant green. The frosting on the top of the cake is dyed a darker green with the matcha powder. I bought gold sanding sugar, just for fun. I failed to buy candles. Oops. (I can’t link to the recipe, because it’s some online cookbook that she has purchased. It should look like this. And yes, I will review the instructions! Burnt way too many times, especially by recipes from novels.)
I started on the lino block project. I already had a pin register system for the actual printing, and developed a fly-by-night pin register for marking the block. And then ordered ink because why decide on a project for which you already have everything you need? Jump in the deep end, I say for no particularly good reason. The only picture I have from the first test is a black oblong with some tiny white marks. We’ll talk again next week.
And of course, the great ordering of seeds. I ordered seeds from John Scheeper’s, for the first time, plus I have seeds left from last year. I’m trying to get a plot in the community gardens, so I ordered a ton of seed. If I don’t get a spot, a friend is expanding his garden space and I’ll send seeds or plants his way. I’m not supposed to dig up the yard where I rent, but they haven’t complained about the containers I’ve put out so far. Somehow, it always seems to be a few more every year. Huh. I snagged a huge foam cooler with a hole cut in one end. I think it will make a marvelous planter if I spray-paint it some earthy color.
Little pegs, stuck in the rock that I can hook onto and pull myself forward and up. For today, I’ve got a Zoom appointment. I’d better go get dolled up (read as, gonna go comb my hair).
Still crying.
Because I am resolving to not shame the heck out of myself for not doing that thing, whatever that thing might have been.
Starting with relief prints.
Look! That one came out okay! Why not do a 5-color reduction block??? No, really, it’s/I’m not actually crazy. I have a pin-register system set up already, that I’ve used successfully on a couple of blocks. I’ve been meaning to concentrate on relief printing for seven years, it’s time I start.
That first one, with one block and one color, that I wasn’t particularly invested in, took allllll of the “Lord of the Rings” movie collection to carve. The pile of papers represents attempts using Gimp photo processing to separate out the areas I need to cut out for each color. The scribbled sheet is my roughed-out plan of action. Shoot! I just realized I didn’t flip any of them. Shoot. Reprint! And before I get too far in, I’m going to have to test out inks, and how they work piled on top of each other. To the Art Cave!
